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Stephen's avatar

Great article.

I agree that the Russian aim is to dictate a peace now. To be fair though, the west has shown itself to be agreement incapable and even to boast of this. The whole Minsk Agreements debacle underlines that. They have been left without a choice. Not the position that Putin (at least) wanted to be in.

Not sure either that Russia wants to be a military superpower. It may just be choice of words. My interpretation is that the government seeks security, for its culture to survive and not to repeat the 90s disaster. Anglo-America is seen as threatening those aims.

Economic dependency of Europe on Russia is also interesting: the other side of that is that Russia buys German manufactures. Trade is two way. Mutual interdependency is probably a better way to conceive of Russia-Europe trade than one way dependency. Of course, ultimately Russia can turn east and ignore Europe, as long as the perceived security threat is eliminated. That will be our loss. I for one do not wish for Europe to be in any way dependent on the U.S. Our elites are operating precisely against our interests. I have a feeling that this whole debacle might ultimately cause a major realignment of foreign policy.

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D-C's avatar

How long until NATO realizes that expansion along Russia's borders makes the original alliance less safe not more? We saw the hair trigger reaction of the Baltics and Poland to the so called missile attack by Russia on Poland. As a Canadian, do I really want to sign up to protect all these Russophobic states (soon to include Finland and Sweden) when some of their crazies can easily provoke WW3?

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